The Painter's Morale Check

Burn out is always a risk with the war painter. You have a vision of an army, but the gulf of time between a box of sprue grey and a fully assembled force is vast. Maybe it is mid way, the point when you decide to batch out the entire run of infantry as a production line. Maybe it is towards the end when you are working in the last of your final highlights and the fatigue is starting to make you sloppy. Most painters will hit a low point of deep and profound regret about ever starting such a monumentally ambitious project in the first place. The temptation to drop the lot will become so strong that many will capitulate to it, and another half finished army ends up on either eBay or the local Facebook swap and sell.

Over the last few years following my re-entry into the hobby I've experimented with a few ways to avoid the painters burn out. Much of it is quite similar to basic techniques for making any long term and tedious job more manageable.

• Make Lists
  I believe that this is the most important first step in becoming a more disciplined painter. This will always force you to confront the magnitude of a project before you undertake it. To do this I don't just write down something as simple as "Bolt Action Army", I break it down unit by unit, and piece by piece. In the end I'll have an itemized list of the exact quantity of work that needs to be carried out before I allow myself to call a project done. I tend to block out almost a year to six month for each list I make, which will contain one or two army projects and up to a dozen smaller projects either as an expansion to an existing army or a small force for a skirmish game. The most important part of this technique is to finish everything on the list before you move on to the new list. If for whatever reason I am unable to finish an item on the list, I cross it out in red, to indicate a failure of a kind. For projects I successfully complete I cross them out in black to indicate a success. Sort of like a quest log for painting, it gamifies it a bit. Keeps you goal focused and always moving forward.
• Productionize
  For the biggest projects the most efficient way to get through them is to develop a standard, staged technique for painting a model, then apply it en-mass to an entire army. To start with I devise my production method by reading up on how others on the internet carried out similar projects and adept to my own on hand colours and equipment. Once I've got a fairly solid plan I pick a single unit from my target projects, then apply the technique to one model. If I like the look, I go ahead and do it to the entire squad. Finally, if it still holds up, I then run it on the entire army. I recently finished an entire 42 man Bolt Action army this way. While the results are only tabletop standard I'm happy with the result and more importantly, the relatively short time it took.
• Mix It Up
  Now, to contradict what I just said. One of the best ways to avoid burn out is to have breaks between large chunks of big projects. In the case of the aforementioned Bolt Action, I started and completed smaller projects from my list in between major milestones for that army. This helps to keep a sense of variety going while at the same time preventing the angst of a big projects from setting in. In my case smaller projects can be useful as well, as they provide me with a chance to experiment, or try a new technique on a few minis, which make great fodder for articles and YouTube videos.
• Appropriate Distractions
  Fill your work space with things that keep your mind engaged, but at the same time keep you working. I imagine this varies a great deal from person to person, but anything audible that doesn't require you to look at it is great for this. Podcasts are fairly good for this as they can help with the loneliness that often afflicts painters, it is a solitary hobby after all. I occasionally use music as well, though I tend towards ambient music or video game sound tracks as the nature of them isn't too engaging, thus allows me to maintain focus on the painting. More confronting and lyric heavy stuff tends to be a distraction for me. YouTube and Netflix can also work, though you have to be careful if you find yourself watching the screen rather than working. If you start doing that you may as well stop painting and more fully engage with whatever you are watching.

These techniques have allowed me to maintain a fairly consistent output in spite of also working a full time job and a moderate video game hobby. I've found these techniques are also applicable in other creative fields such as writing and game development. Of course, I'd like to finish off with a caveat, what works for me may not work for you. If you find that to be the case then the best I can suggest is that the root causes of your distractions from painting and try to work around them. It may well be that you're simply burned out, that is fine and it happens. If it does there is no harm in hanging up the paintbrush for a time and doing something else until you are good and ready to return to it.

Anyway, best of luck with your painting and may it be productive.